Since The Document Foundation was announced in September 2010 it has made tremendous progress with LibreOffice, now summarized in an infographic. It is a real insight into the workings of a major open source project.

LibreOffice 3.5, which is due next week, is promised to be "a leaner and cleaner office suite, packed with new features".

While The Document Foundation (TDF) acknowledges that there is still quite a long way to go, the core development team has managed to attract close to 400 new developers, and has achieved a large number of the ambitious goals originally outlined when it forked from OpenOffice.org.

The infographic, which is a real insight into the workings of a major open source project. previews information that TDF will present at this weekend's Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium (February 4-5, 2012)

It shows that while the largest share of commits has been made by volunteers, SUSE and RedHat together have made about half of the total. A core group of 50 developers, paid and volunteers are responsible for key features and strategy while the larger groups of regular and occasional volunteers see to small features, hacks and patches.

The large number of bug fixes in December was presumably due to the virtual bug hunt organized that month.

In future the infographic will be updated on a monthly basis so we will be able to follow the progress on removal of dead code and see the names of the top bug reporters and solvers.